“Okay. Speaking as a fellow queer person, and also as someone who recently threw away the best relationship she’s ever had because she couldn’t talk about her feelings—”
Anne felt a twinge of guilt. What she’d modeled for Claire, her daughter had learned well.
“—I can’t believe I’m about to say this, because clichés normally make me break out in hives, but look: Life’s too short to spend it not going after what’s right for you. If this is whoyou are—and it sounds like you’re pretty positive it is—then you deserve to have what makes you happy. Don’t wait.”
“Claire.” Anne had the strange sense that her life was slowly expanding to fill the possibilities waiting for it. “Thank you. Very much.”
Claire looked away into the corner of the room and brushed a fast finger under her right eye. “So. You’re a lesbian. Which you apparently realized at some point between lunch on Sunday and right now. What happened? Did you binge-watch a bunch ofL Wordepisodes? Spend a lot of quality time at the Sherman Oaks Subaru dealership? Hook up with Sadie?”
Shit. “I,” Anne stammered, “I, um—”
Her face had to be turning bright red, the truth written all over it, because Claire was staring at her in absolute astonishment.
“I waskidding. I was totally—Mom? You’re not seriously telling me—fuck, youwentfor it? Oh shit, is that why she took the lead role inEscape from Topanga Canyon? Of course that’s why.”
Denial seemed entirely pointless. “I’d pick a different phrase than ‘hook up,’” Anne managed, “but let’s just say that isn’t entirely off the mark.”
“You’re telling me that you had”—Claire stage-whispered it—“sexwith Sadie after straight up denying to Brooke and me that you were stupidly and completely in love with her? By the way, please know that if I could outsource asking this question to one of Xiomara’s prissy interns without risking a lawsuit, I would do it so fast, their little bowties would spin.”
“Can a lesbian really ‘straight up’ deny something?” Anne asked before she could stop herself.
“Okay, cool, you’re a comedian now, in addition to being gay and super evasive. Focus, Mom. Or should I start calling you Mom One now?”
“We—had an encounter.” Anne’s cheeks boiled. “I guess it really depends on the definition of—”
“No, no, no, no, no. Stop right there. I am one hundred and fifty percent okay with not establishing in any detail whatsoever the exact parameters of the sex you did or didn’t have with Mom Two. What Iwouldlike to hear about is if, you know, things. If they’re okay.”
“Things?”
“Well, obviously, noteverything; everything clearly isn’t okay; the entire world is a giant apocalyptic trash heap. I guess I’m referring to a very specific part of the world that I happen to care about in this particular moment. More than most of the other parts.”
“Claire, are you trying to ask me how I’m feeling?”
“Yes,” Claire said with relief. “That.”
Anne felt like an arm, weak and withered, coming out of a three-month cast; like unstopped nostrils after a bad cold. She felt like an ear with chronic tinnitus that suddenly, blissfully, heard nothing at all.
She looked at Claire, who glanced down again, and away. For once, her daughter’s jaw was relaxed, not stiff with defensiveness. In the soft curve of it, Anne suddenly saw the familiar shape of her little girl, the flicker of Claire’s disappeared face.
“How did you feel?” she asked quietly. “Whenyoucame out?”
Claire’s head snapped up, eyes big and bright. “When I—?”
“I’ve never asked you, have I?” Claire hadn’t exactly ‘come out’ to her family; during her second year at Parsons School of Design, she’d casually referenced a girlfriend in the third paragraph of an email and then refused to discuss it further. “What was it like for you?”
The stunned expression on Claire’s face was completely foreign. Had she been here all along, this daughter Anne was beginning to see?
“When I was little, maybe four or five years old,” Claire said after a moment, “I got stuck in the old crawlspace under the house. No one knew where I was. Ring a bell?”
Terror like that didn’t ever fully leave your bones. “Of course.”
“You found me eventually—I’m sure I was crying loud enough for you to follow the sound. But you couldn’t come in and pull me out because the crawlspace was too narrow. I had to do it myself. You talked me through it.”
It had felt like it took hours, days, months. Anne had somehow managed to stay calm.
“And once I finally got out, I stood up—I was filthy—and I started to spin around in a circle, with my arms out wide.”
“Yes,” Anne said slowly. “You yelled, ‘Watch me, I can do this now!’ I remember.”